Microsoft Baseball 2000

Not a bad deal considering it's only $20.

The best thing about Microsoft Baseball 2000 is its price, $20. And in fact, all the baseball games have been relatively cheap this year, with Hardball 6 2000 Edition at $20, High Heat 2000 at $30, and Triple Play 2000 at $40 (according to EB World, at least). Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, since a lot of sports games don't do much but tweak the graphics and update the rosters year after year.

Which is pretty much what Microsoft Baseball 2000 does. The game isn't all that different from last year's Microsoft Baseball 3D, although there are some bug fixes and the most stringent requirement from last year--that you gotta have a 3D accelerator--has been lifted, as a software-only mode is now included.

However you should play with 3D acceleration since the graphics are among the best of this year's crop of PC games, well animated and with superb stadiums. The stadiums are so good in fact, that when you hit a towering pop fly, the camera pitches way the heck up there, following pretty much the entire trajectory of the ball's path. This is in sharp contrast to most games, which kind of lose the ball for a while if it gets up in the lights. Not here--you can actually see the ball go all the way over Fenway Park's infamous Green Monster (the tallest outfield wall in baseball) and on to the other side, where several street buildings are modeled and textured (see screen shot, "Behind the Green Monster"), below.

Players are also nicely animated and modeled in a variety of shapes and sizes and texture mapped with realistic faces. The animations, such as they are, are handled well, but it's a little short on variety--the most glaring omission being that players don't duck away from the inside pitch.

And there are other visual problems. Lock-up, for one thing, is too common, and in fact, the accompanying readme.txt file specifically talks about this problem, recommending that you hit "CTRL+F3" to unfreeze the game when it freezes, although that doesn't always work.

There are some other graphical glitches, the most obvious being artifacts of the player cursor being left all over the screen after you move an infielder around (look at the screen shot, "Graphical Glitch", at the bottom of the page). It looks like he's leaving trails of yellow fire all over the field, which would be a neat effect in a game like Diablo but is probably not real good for a baseball field. And while this glitch can be overlooked, the random lock ups cannot. Nothing's more frustrating than battling all day in a closely fought game only to lock up at the top of the ninth with two outs and the tying run at third.

Of course it's not about the graphics, it's about the game on the field, but unfortunately that aspect doesn't quite measure up. It's not that it's remarkably bad, it's just that it's ordinary. If anything, it's too arcade-y, a quieter, sedate Triple Play.

Pitchers throw one of up to four pitches in their repertoire, and you choose pitch location with a circle icon, with a little of wiggle room that lets you inch the ball one way or the other after it's been released. Wild pitches aren't too common, and it's really not that difficult to get the ball where you want it.

Ninety percent of baseball is the struggle between pitcher and batter and so the single most important feature for a baseball game is getting this part of the interface right.

Microsoft Baseball 2000 doesn't do a bad job in this department, but it simply doesn't deliver enough information to really let you know all you need to know in order to make an informed decision about how to pitch a guy, or how to hit off of a particular pitcher. Unfortunately, this is a problem all the PC games have had this year--in my opinion all of them, even High Heat, which is the PC's best, has been blown away by All-Star Baseball 2000 for the Nintendo 64, which has the most detailed, useful, workable fun-to-play pitcher/batter thing around. Name another game that when you come to the plate for the second time you get a chart detailing the pitch sequence the last time that guy was up--all without fumbling through a menu. Or one that shows whether a particular hitter is a hot hitter or a cold hitter on the inside part of the plate, up and in, down and away, and so on.

Things don't get that detailed here. In Microsoft 2000, all hitters seem created equal. You choose a power, normal or contact swing, and then sit and wait on the pitch coming out of the pitcher's arm and move the contact point (represented by a simple square) in the direction of the ball's anticipated landing spot (represented by a simple circle). It's generally pretty easy to pick the ball out of the pitcher's hand and move your bat to hit it, but enough difficulty toggles let you adjust the difficulty to where you need it to be. You can move around in the box before the pitch, which affects your coverage of the plate, but you can't angle the contact point of your bat in order to pull the ball one way or the other or up and down (ground vs. pop fly). It's a simple system that works and can be entertaining for a quick game of baseball, but it's unremarkable.

Defensive positioning is fairly standard too, as are the fielding options (auto, assist or manual), but pitching is sub-par. The most important things you need to know about a pitcher when you are playing a baseball game ought to be on the screen, or at most one single button push away, at all times. But in order to check on your pitcher's stamina, you have to hit F12 on the keyboard or mouse around to get to the bullpen. Why am I juggling interface devices? Put the damn health bar over his head. The other thing you need to know is what his pitches are--which MS Baseball does show you--but you also need to know how good each pitch is, preferably with a letter grade or some kind of numerical rating. You need to know this as a batter so you know what pitch the guy is likely to strike you out with, or how bad his curveball breaks, and you need to know this as a pitcher so you're not throwing a slow, weak slider, thinking that's your "out" pitch. I've yet to see any game provide this information readily.

So there's not enough detail there for the avid PC game-playing baseball nut, and this lack of depth at the plate seems to roll into similarly uninteresting results on the field: like EA Sports' game, home runs come in batches, singles and extra base hits are under-represented. While not as egregious as Triple Play perhaps, it doesn't really stand up to High Heat when it comes to results and variety.

Management options are similarly limited to trades and a season mode, but completely lacks the depth of High Heat's current career mode, which models franchise through several levels of minor leagues. This is not a game for armchair GMs.

In short, it's too easy to guess ball or strike and there're too many home runs. It's a glorified arcade game, in a year that's seen a few too many of those already. Still, it's a reasonable approximation of baseball at a price that can't be beat, and at least that counts for something.